In general, preflight is a process that enables users to check a document for errors. The preflight is applied so that errors can be corrected before the document is sent to a printer. For example, the document may be an electronic version of a magazine, and errors in the document can prove to be expensive when the magazine has to be reprinted to remove the errors. An example of preflight features may be found in ADOBE® ACROBAT of Adobe Systems of San Jose, Calif.
A preflight rule is a small bit of intelligence (and parameters) that looks for a particular kind of problem in a document. For example a rule may look for text that is too small. Such a rule might have two parameters which include whether to check the text and if the text is to be checked, whether the text is too small. The first parameter is the on/off state of the rule. The second parameter is a threshold value to determine whether the text is too small. For example, the threshold may be four (4) points or 0.055 inches in height. A preflight profile may simply be a collection of preflight rules. Each preflight profile may be associated with a preflight name. For example, there may be a preflight profile called “Magazine” which includes preflight rules that may be used to check for errors in a document that will be used as part of a magazine publication. The preflight rules in the “Magazine” preflight profile may restrict the document from having any spot colors and from having any text smaller than 6 points in size, and so on.
Typically, the preflight is applied to a document using only one preflight profile at a time. This arrangement may not be ideal and may be very time consuming.